# What do you do for a living?

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2016/10/25/what-do-you-do-for-a-living/
- Published: 2016-10-25T12:09:22+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

#### The dread question that begs another: are you worthy of a living?

![](https://www.andreidraganescu.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/50e38-1iseuf-jpbtoeonrgrn7rcw.
gif)

Am I? I don’t know. I sell myself as high as I’m able to, but I never received the
scale of worthiness.

I watched this movie, About a boy, and in it this guy Hugh Grant was playing, had
no job because of steady income from royalty. Throughout the entire movie this situation
was described ad nauseam as undesirable because “he did nothing”. This is crazy.
This is the craziness I notice when I hear people telling me:

> “if people wouldn’t go to work, what would they do all day long?”.

I don’t know.

Be?

For living I do what everyone else does: I breathe, I eat, I drink and I sleep.

> For A living I survive, and I wish I would thrive.

Why must we earn a living?

Earn a living? Earn the thing while having the thing?

It is as if you’re given a free TV and if you don’t watch it 10 hours a day you 
loose your house, and the TV.

Everyone of us with a job is in survival mode. A good paycheck is still a paycheck
and the conditioning that is building inside the brain is survival mentality.

The thing is “a living” is a product. We buy it with work, work which actually creates
all the “livings”. A self reinforcing cycle. That’d be great by itself, but, you
see, this “living” product doesn’t come full option by default.

A living has many quality levels and huge number of optional features, and the price
tag on it respects market dynamics. How do you create demand for what everyone effectively
is defined by, which is being alive? No, killing people is hard and also bad business,
but we tried that too, multiple times. Today, because a living is a product to be
sold, demand had to be created by making simple living suck more and more.

Anyway, I make web software in general and product management in particular. Doing
this I earn a good living. I don’t want a good living, I actually want the best 
living money can buy. That is why I don’t write more than blog posts, why I changed
careers four times, why I have had four attempts of making my own business which
failed four times. I have a paycheck and a lot of frustration.

I am not ashamed of my frustration. It’s pure energy not put to use.